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Some of the smartest writing on 21st-century gender politics right now can be found at Soho Theatre – the venue that gave us Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag in its original incarnation and followed it up earlier this year with Vicky Jones’s blissfully funny Touch, about the rampant sexual adventures of thirtysomething Dee.

Now comes this short, sharp two-hander about a one-night stand in Belfast from rising talent David Ireland that takes a paring knife both to today’s chaotic sex wars and the entrenched culture fissures of modern Northern Ireland, with the added bonus of several wincing gags that powerfully flirt with the borders of taste.

Dermot and Janet, having got together on the internet, are now in bed, their energetic coupling seemingly unimpeded by the fact Janet is wearing a mouse costume.

That’s the least of it: once the pair have gathered their post-coital breath, she lets slip she accidentally killed her husband after a particularly adventurous bout of sex involving a courgette and threw his chopped-up body in the bin.

Rufus WrightCredit:
John Snelling

Janet (Elinor Lawless), who is Protestant, prickly and a bit slippery, is full of subversive little revelations such as this – she’s joking about the husband, thankfully, but on other issues (her casual racism; her flat-out ignorance of popular culture staples, her insistence it was God’s idea she wear the mouse costume) you are left tantalisingly unsure to what extent she is speaking the truth.

Rufus Wright’s Dermot is everything she is not – a politically right on, lapsed Catholic atheist puffed up with self-righteousness and perfect fodder for Janet’s merciless deconstruction of his careful self image. (One of the incidental revelations of this play, well, to me at any rate, is the way it shows how anonymous internet hook-ups allow participants to briefly take on any identity they want.)

It’s a pity then that, after 20 minutes or so of perfect, pitch-black comedy, Ireland should then balk at further advancing his sharply drilled assault on modish cultural pieties – when Janet reveals the body dysmorphia that lies behind her mouse costume, you so want this to be another of her playful provocations rather than the actual truth.

Instead, both characters reveal themselves to be a bit more depressingly stereotypical– he a raging chauvinist straight out of the Harvey Weinstein school of “but I love all women really”; she a needy, lonely single woman. Given what has preceded it, the ending feels like a cop-out. It’s worth it though for those first 20 minutes and in particular for Lawless’s Janet, who somehow manages to be both bleakly moving and quite inscrutable at the same time.